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 134 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

up as the ideal virtues rather than love of country. In the early Christian centuries, Lecky tells us, the civic virtues were on the whole greatly diminished and sometimes almost extinct. "The quarrels between the factions of the chariot races for a long period eclipsed all political and intellectual differences, filled streets with blood, and determined revolutions of the state." Christianity, by laying emphasis upon the value of the subjective attitudes of the individual, tended to underrate the worth of the civic and intellectual virtues. The whole power of the doctrine of the other world, the New Jerusalem, lay in the fact that the present world, with its institutions, had disintegrated, and it was easier to construct an ideal world than to reconstruct the ruins of the real world. The treachery toward every department of government, the cowardice of the army, the frivolity of charac- ter that demanded violent emotional excitement even in the midst of great material disaster, the subtle controversies of the Pelagians, the frequent willingness of the religionist to betray his country, all these things are evidences of the loss of the power of the objective order upon men's minds and the substitu- tion of more or less personal interests.

The multiplication of illegitimate organizations and commu- nities outside the state were but the further expression of the deep disintegrating movement. The members of these organiza- tions boasted that they had no interests more indifferent to them than those of their own country. This is the natural confession of the subjectivist. Patriotism was the expression of the soli- darity of the primitive state. Hence, when the state gave way the objective emotion of patriotism gave way with it. The broader life into which the ancients were irresistibly led rendered it impossible for the primitive solidarity to endure. Thus the decay of the state and the changed attitude toward it were co-ordinate results of a single process.

These facts, familiar to all, are offered in support of the proposition that the emotional characteristics of a people are largely dependent on the form of their social evolution. There can be no doubt but that the period just considered was a time when, under the stress of growth, the old order was disintegrat-